William Manchester is a scholar. After all, he's written 18 books, one of which I read from cover to cover: Death of a President, about the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. That's the book Jacqueline Kennedy gave him a fit over, even demanding a title change which he did. He wrote a book about the Middle Ages titled A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE.
In that book, Manchester makes some professorial declarations two of which are: "Pagan philosophers argued that the Gospels contradicted themselves, which they do." And, "Genesis assumes a plurality of gods."
Immediately, Manchester jumps ahead a thousand years to 1090 AD. He's just made two sweeping statements with his broad bush and goes into the Middle Ages. What's he done? He's assumed that the reader will merely take what he says for the gospel truth (pun intended). He offers no argument, no proof for such statements, he just moves on, leaving the reader to doubt the Scriptures.
Manchester is typical of a host of historians who aren't used to being questioned when they make such statements, and we can learn from them. My American history professor made the statement in class, "The Jews didn't have a flood story until they came out of the Babylonian Captivity." We didn't question his pontificating; I knew he was echoing a liberal line, but I knew nothing about the counter arguments since I was a lowly and humble freshman at the time. He, like Manchester, offered no proof for what he said; he just went on with his lecturing on American history from 1861 to the present day. What that statement had to do with the War Between the States, I have no idea. It seemed to be dragged in kicking and screaming and off the subject.
But we can learn from this: when a person, learned or otherwise, makes such statements, ask, "What proof do they offer or do they just move on to the next thousand years? If we ask, we don't let them get away with peddling declarations that degrade the Bible.
